The Politics of "Actor-Network Theory"

Abstract

This text discusses controversies surrounding theoretical, practical, and political implications of "actor-network theory" ("ANT"). Since its inception around 1980, "ANT" has been applied in an immense number of empirical studies, both within and outside the field of science and technology studies. But it was also rejected as radical chic without substance and/or as theoretically and politically unacceptable in perhaps as many instances as it was accepted. Implicit in both the application and critique of "ANT" is the assumption that it can be treated as a "black-boxed" set of notions and rules containing certain strengths and weaknesses. Proposing to treat black-boxed "ANT" as useful provocation, I discuss what this kind of "ANT" can and cannot do for me in my own empirical research on energy efficiency in buildings. In the second part of the text I turn from "black boxed" and well-defined "ANT" to "ANT in the making". In recent and ongoing work Bruno Latour, John Law, Annemarie Mol, Vicky Singleton, and others (in alphabetic order) answer to critiques of "ANT"s" political implications. The authors share an interest in the development of a non-essentialist foundation of politics, which neither turns into crude functionalism nor into hollow relativism. Concluding this text, two of the proposals made here, "political ecology" and "ontological politics", are compared and discussed in the context of my own research.